JJ Heller Tracking

I spent 3 great days last week tracking the basics for JJ Heller’s new record in the Neve room at Quad Studios.  The band was killer: Will Sayles on drums, Tony Lucido on bass and Tyler Burkum and Kris Donegan on guitar. The record is being produced by Cason Cooley and Ben Shive, 2 of the most talented producers I’ve ever worked with.

We didn’t have an overabundance of time, since we needed to get strong foundations for 10 songs done in the 3 days, but we did take the time to tailor the sounds to each song. This is something that I absolutely love doing especially with drum sounds, and something that both Cason and Ben also work really hard to do. For some of the songs we took advantage of the chamber and all of the room mics to make the drums sound big and roomy. On others we recorded only a few mics, going for a much tighter and drier sound. As an engineer, it’s inspiring and fulfilling to work with people who really care and who take the time to get the right sound for each song or part. This was definitely one of those sessions.

There are a 3 main reasons to work in the Neve room at Quad:

1) History. Neil Young’s “Harvest” was cut there, among many others.

2) 32 channel original Neve 8068 console. Enough said.

3) A fantastic sounding echo chamber.

If you’ve never gotten to use a real echo chamber, you owe it to yourself to seek one out. They are usually quite small spaces, with completely shellacked walls, a speaker at one end and a microphone or microphones at some distance away. Great echo chambers have a very natural decay that sits well in a track, and the one at Quad (it’s in the basement!) is a great one. We used it extensively on drums (pretty obvious) and B3 on JJ’s record. It was great on the B3, giving it dreamy, washed out quality on a couple of the songs.

Until next time.